Ion

Summary

Ion is one of Plato's shortest dialogues, a single conversation between Socrates and Ion of Ephesus, a rhapsode who earns his living reciting Homer at festivals and lecturing on what the poems mean. Ion has just come from Epidaurus, where he won first prize at the games held for Asclepius, and he is bound for the Panathenaea at Athens. He believes he can say more and finer things about Homer than any critic alive, and he thinks the Homeridae ought to give him a golden crown. Socrates begins with a puzzle Ion cannot answer. If Homer and Hesiod treat the same subjects, and whoever can judge a good speaker on a subject can also judge a bad one, why does Ion grow drowsy whenever anyone mentions another poet? Socrates' answer is the famous image of the magnet. The Muse is like the stone of Heraclea, which not only draws iron rings but makes them able to draw others. She moves the poet, the poet moves the reciter, and the reciter moves the crowd, a hanging chain of borrowed power. Poets, on this account, compose while out of their senses, like Corybantic dancers or Bacchic women, and God speaks through them as through prophets. Ion, moved and flattered, agrees, and admits that when he recites the sorrows of Hecuba his eyes fill with tears and his hair stands on end, while he keeps one eye on the audience and his fee. The second half tests whether the rhapsode has any knowledge of his own. Socrates sets passages of Homer before him: Nestor's advice on rounding the turn in the chariot race, Hecamede's posset for the wounded Machaon, a simile from fishing, the visions of the seer Theoclymenus. In each case Ion concedes that the charioteer, the physician, the fisherman or the prophet judges better than he does. Pressed to name the part of Homer that belongs to the rhapsode alone, he retreats to knowing what a general should say to his troops, and finally claims that a good rhapsode is a good general. Socrates asks why the best general in Greece wanders about reciting poems, compares him to the shape-shifting Proteus, and offers him a choice between being thought dishonest or inspired. Ion takes inspiration. The dialogue is comic, and much of its comedy turns on Ion's vanity, but its questions are serious. Socrates neither despises poetry nor defends it as knowledge; he calls Homer the best and most divine of poets and still denies that the reciter possesses an art. Readers have long noticed the irony in his praise of divine madness, which leaves the poet honoured and yet without responsibility for the truth of what he says. The Ion stands behind the fuller critique of poetry in the Republic and the more generous account of inspired madness in the Phaedrus, and it raises for Christian readers the difference between a frenzy that bypasses the mind and the inspiration of Scripture, in which the human authors wrote with understanding.

Plot or Argument

• Prize-winner from Epidaurus (530a-c)

  Socrates greets Ion on his return from the festival of Asclepius, envies the rhapsode's fine clothes and constant company with Homer, and draws out Ion's boast that no critic, Metrodorus and Stesimbrotus included, has had as many good ideas about Homer as he.

• Why only Homer? (531a-533c)

  Ion admits that his skill extends to Homer alone. Socrates argues from arithmetic, diet, painting, sculpture and music that whoever judges the best speaker on a subject also judges the worse, so that a real art of poetry would cover every poet. Ion's sleepiness before Hesiod and Archilochus therefore shows that he has no art.

• The stone of Heraclea (533d-535a)

  Socrates offers the magnet image: the Muse inspires the poet, who passes the power to the rhapsode, who passes it to the audience. Poets compose out of their minds, like Corybants and Bacchants, and the case of Tynnichus, who wrote one great paean and nothing else worth remembering, is offered as proof that the gods speak through them.

• Tears on the platform (535b-536d)

  Ion confesses that pity fills his eyes and terror makes his hair stand on end as he performs, while he watches the faces of the crowd with an eye to payment. Socrates names the spectator as the last ring in the chain and describes choruses and masters hanging from the Muse, each poet possessed by his own.

• Whose art judges these lines? (536e-540c)

  Socrates quotes Homer on chariot driving, on a restorative drink of Pramnian wine, on a fisherman's lead weight, and on omens. In every case Ion grants that the practitioner of the relevant craft, not the rhapsode, is the proper judge, and he cannot name a passage that falls to the rhapsode's art.

• The rhapsode as general (540d-542b)

  Ion claims to know what a general should say and then that a good rhapsode is a good general. Socrates mocks his escape, calls him a Proteus, and offers the alternatives of dishonest craftsman or inspired reciter. Ion chooses to be called divine.

Characters

• Socrates, questioner

  Professes envy of the rhapsode and admiration for Homer, then uses a chain of everyday crafts to show that Ion cannot say what he knows; his praise of divine possession is delivered with evident irony.

• Ion of Ephesus, rhapsode

  A celebrated performer and lecturer on Homer, fresh from a festival victory; warm, vain and eager, he is moved by Socrates' speech about inspiration without noticing what it costs his claim to expertise.

• Homer, absent poet

  Never present, but constantly quoted; the Iliad and Odyssey supply the test passages on chariots, medicine, fishing, prophecy and war.

• Tynnichus of Chalcis, example cited by Socrates

  A poet remembered for a single admired paean, cited as evidence that excellent verse can come from an otherwise undistinguished maker.

Lessons

• Loving a poem is not the same as knowing a craft

  Ion's devotion to Homer is real, and his performances move twenty thousand people. Socrates does not deny either fact. He asks a narrower question: can Ion give an account of what makes Homer good that would also let him judge any other poet? The dialogue separates enthusiasm, which can be narrow and still genuine, from knowledge, which reaches the whole of its subject.

  • Is Socrates right that a person who can judge the best poet on a subject must also be able to judge the worst?
  • Can someone be a fine interpreter of one author without being a literary critic in general?
  • What would Ion need to say to show that he has an art rather than a gift?

• The magnet and the chain of rings

  The image at 533d-536d explains three things at once: why poetry moves people, why the performer seems to share the poet's power, and why neither can explain that power. It also places the audience at the end of the chain. Students should notice that the image flatters Ion while quietly removing his claim to expertise, and that its picture of the poet as a light, winged and holy thing comes from a speaker who elsewhere asks for reasons.

  • What does each part of the magnet image correspond to, and where does it break down?
  • Is it a compliment or a criticism to tell a poet that he does not know what he is saying?
  • Do you think Socrates believes his own speech about divine possession? What in the text suggests irony or sincerity?

• Who judges Homer's chariot race?

  Socrates' test is simple and still useful. When a poem describes chariot driving, medicine, fishing or warfare, the expert in that craft can say whether the description is accurate. The rhapsode cannot. This raises a lasting question about what kind of truth poetry offers: if it is not technical truth, is it any truth at all, or is it truth of another kind that the dialogue does not name?

  • Should a war poem be judged by a soldier, a historian, or a reader of poetry?
  • Does a novel about medicine have to be medically accurate to be good?
  • What kind of knowledge, if any, belongs to the reader of poems rather than to the practitioners of the crafts the poems describe?

• Performance, payment and the divided heart

  Ion's most revealing admission is that he weeps when he recites the sorrows of Troy while watching the crowd, because if they cry he will laugh when he is paid. The performer is both carried away and calculating. The passage invites honest reflection on any public role, including preaching, teaching and acting, in which real feeling and concern for reward can sit side by side.

  • Is Ion sincere when he weeps on stage?
  • Is it wrong to be paid for moving people's emotions?
  • How can a speaker guard against caring more about the audience's reaction than about the truth of what is said?

• Divine frenzy and the inspiration of Scripture

  Socrates says that God takes away the minds of poets and uses them as ministers, as he uses diviners and prophets. Christian readers have sometimes compared this with the doctrine of inspiration, but the differences are large. The biblical writers wrote as themselves, with memory, research and argument (Luke 1:1-4; 2 Peter 1:21), and Paul insisted that prophecy in the church be intelligible and that the spirits of prophets are subject to the prophets (1 Corinthians 14:32). Comparing the two accounts helps students see what Plato's Socrates is and is not claiming.

  • How does the Ion's picture of the poet out of his senses differ from the way Luke describes writing his Gospel?
  • Why might it matter whether an inspired speaker understands what he says?
  • Does the Ion make poets more or less responsible for the content of their poems?

Context

Rhapsodes were professional reciters of epic who competed at festivals such as the Panathenaea at Athens and the Asclepieia at Epidaurus, performing from a platform in elaborate dress and offering commentary on the poems. By the late fifth century Homer was the centre of Greek education, and critics such as Metrodorus of Lampsacus and Stesimbrotus of Thasos, both named by Ion, interpreted him allegorically or explained his meanings. The dialogue's dramatic date is usually placed during the Peloponnesian War, since Ion says that Ephesus is subject to Athens; the reference to foreign-born Athenian generals has been used to narrow it further, though scholars disagree.

Composition

The Ion is usually counted among Plato's early dialogues, written in the first decades of the fourth century BC; no secure date exists, and Jowett's introduction notes that the work has no early external testimony and that its authenticity rests on internal grounds. Most modern scholars accept it as Plato's. The library's text is Benjamin Jowett's translation (third edition, 1892), which omits Stephanus numbers; locations in this record are given by Stephanus page for use with other editions.

Reception

The magnet image became one of the most cited passages in Western discussion of inspiration. Renaissance Platonists, especially Marsilio Ficino, developed the idea of the poet's divine furor; Philip Sidney and later Shelley drew on it in their defences of poetry. Goethe disparaged the dialogue, while others valued it as a compact statement of the problem that the Republic treats at length. It is often taught as the first text in the long quarrel between philosophy and poetry.

Comparisons

• The Iliad

  Socrates builds his test from the Iliad itself: Nestor's chariot-race advice in Book 23, Hecamede's posset for Machaon in Book 11, the omen of the eagle and snake in Book 12. Reading those scenes in context shows how much the Ion depends on treating Homer as a store of technical information, an assumption the epic does not make about itself.

• The Odyssey

  Ion's best effects include Odysseus leaping onto the threshold to shoot the suitors, and Socrates quotes Theoclymenus' vision of the doomed suitors from Book 20. The Odyssey also gives the poet a voice inside the poem in the bards Phemius and Demodocus, whom it calls god-taught, a self-portrait that both supports and complicates Socrates' theory.

• Poetics

  Aristotle answers the Ion's challenge by treating poetry as a craft with its own principles of plot, character and diction, so that a critic can judge it without being a general or a physician. Where Socrates denies the poet an art, Aristotle writes the manual for one, and he explicitly says that technical errors about horses or medicine are not errors of poetry itself.

• The Republic

  Books II-III and X of the Republic carry forward the Ion's suspicion of poets who speak about generalship, medicine and the gods without knowledge, now joined to concern for the formation of the young and to the theory that imitation is at a third remove from truth. The Ion's genial irony becomes a proposal for censorship.

• Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII

  In the Phaedrus Socrates praises madness from the Muses as a divine gift and says that the sane poet's work is eclipsed by the inspired one. Read beside the Ion, the passage shows that Plato's view of inspiration is neither simply mocking nor simply admiring, and that the same image can honour poetry and limit its authority.

Quotes

Medical Lens

The Ion is not a medical text, but two features interest historians of medicine and psychiatry. First, it uses medicine as a model of genuine expertise: the physician, like the charioteer and the fisherman, is the proper judge of Homer's lines about his craft, and the test passage is Hecamede's restorative drink for the wounded Machaon, quoted in the dialogue as Pramnian wine with grated goat's-milk cheese and an onion as relish, an early literary description of a remedy. Second, Socrates' account of poetic possession, with its comparison to Corybantic dancers and Bacchic women who are not in their right minds, belongs to the Greek vocabulary of divine madness later classified in the Phaedrus. Ion's report of tears, bristling hair and pounding heart during performance is a vivid first-person description of the bodily effects of absorbed emotion. Readings of this as trance or dissociation are interpretive; the dialogue frames it religiously and ironically, not clinically.

• 531e

  Socrates names the physician as the one who can judge which speaker talks best about the wholesomeness of food.

  Physicians Doctors
• 533e-534d

  Poets compared to Corybantic revellers and Bacchic maidens who compose only when out of their senses; God takes away their minds and uses them like diviners.

  Altered States
• 535b-e

  Ion describes weeping, hair standing on end and a throbbing heart while reciting, and Socrates argues that a man weeping amid friendly crowds is not in his right mind.

  Altered States Mind Body
• 538b-c

  Hecamede's posset for the wounded Machaon (Iliad 11) is assigned to the judgment of the art of medicine rather than the rhapsode.

  Ancient Medicine Physicians Doctors
• 540c

  Ion concedes that the physician, not the rhapsode, knows what the one in charge of a sick man ought to say.

  Physicians Doctors

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write a short scene in which a modern Socrates questions a famous film critic or podcaster who claims to understand one director better than anyone, using the Ion's test of whether the same skill applies to other directors.

• Essay

  Socrates gives Ion a choice between being thought dishonest or inspired. Write an essay arguing that there is a third option Ion could have taken, and show where in the dialogue he might have taken it.

• Classroom

  Pick four passages from a poem or novel you have read that describe a skill (sailing, cooking, nursing, fighting). For each, name the expert who could judge its accuracy, then decide whether inaccuracy would make the passage worse as literature.

• Poetry

  Write a poem in the voice of one ring in Socrates' magnetic chain, speaking to the ring above it and the ring below.

Further Reading

• Phaedrus, Plato

  Contains the fuller account of the four kinds of divine madness, including the madness of the Muses.

• Republic, Plato

  Books II-III and X develop the critique of poetry that the Ion begins.

• Poetics, Aristotle

  Treats poetry as an art with its own standards, a direct alternative to the Ion's view.

• The Defence of Poesy, Philip Sidney

  An Elizabethan answer to Plato's charges against the poets.

• A Defence of Poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Romantic defence that takes up the Platonic idea of the poet as an unconscious vessel of inspiration; Shelley also translated the Ion.